James-F wrote:

Your DMACTL jumper is obviously set to the wrong position in your photos, it should be the two RIGHT pins shorted.

Go HERE: http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.co.il/2013/06 … ms-upgrade.html
Search for: DMACTL

Thanks for checking my issue out! Unfortunately that's not it.

2) My card works in some games, I hear both digitised sound and music in WOLF3D, it's the drivers installers and diagnose programs that don't work. Well King's Quest 5 doesn't work, but I heard it's a problem for some other cards too so I'm not sure it's related to this exact issue, could be my version of the game (GOG).

3) Despite what nerdlypleasures say the position of DMCTL jumper doesn't affect sound playback. I observe no change in behavior when I change the position of this jumper. This page states the jumper disables or enables shared DMA. I didn't find what shared DMA means yet. But sure I'll use it with shared DMA enabled from now on because there are indeed more photos on the internet with this feature enabled.

alexsydneynsw wrote:

I didn't find what shared DMA means yet. But sure I'll use it with shared DMA enabled from now on because there are indeed more photos on the internet with this feature enabled.

According to my Sound Blaster Pro 2.0 manual, shared DMA is for sharing the same DMA channel with other adapter cards (it doesn't go into detail about what kind of cards, or how the sharing works). It also says that the default setting is non-shared.

A status update:

I decided to actually play a game with this card rather than just doing a quick test and I got a revelation that the card's digital sound effects are incredibly distorted, I installed Sound Blaster Pro just to double check and yeah the distortion on Sound Blaster 2.0 is huge. I've never noticed this before because I only bothered to hear first sound effect to come through and went back to researching.

You are probably overdriving the recording input.
The SBPro distortion level is no different to the SB2.0 as far as I can hear and measure.